Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t

What happened

Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the future of business, and I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief for the US Department of Justice in the Biden administration. These days, he’s both a professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation.

And then there’s an incredible backbone of antitrust concern floating throughout all of this. Are these companies trying to form a cartel? Are they aware that maybe their IPOs aren’t going to go the way they want to, so they’re seeking regulatory capture in some way that is good or bad? Are they trying to foreclose cheaper competition from open-weight Chinese models?

Give me your sense of just the state of things right now, and then I want to dive into the specifics with you. The state of the world right now is like we’ve invented cars and trucks, but we have no lines on the road, no traffic lights and no stop signs and no speed limits.

We’ve invented this incredibly powerful technology that’s transforming how we live our lives, how we conduct business, how we socialize, how we seek and generate and consume information. We need some basic rules of the road. I think about it on two fronts. What are the things that companies should be doing? And what are things the government should be doing? There are responsibilities on both ends.

I’m happy to dive into both. Let’s just start with the very notion that asking for regulation necessarily forms a cartel. All the big frontier AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, even Elon Musk — do not necessarily like each other. These are people that do not necessarily like each other. They are saying in concert that they should slow down.

” My read of this is that they simply do not trust each other, that they are in a prisoner’s dilemma and they need an outside force, most likely the government, to enforce some kind of policy framework on them that they have to agree with. Is that a fair read of just the basics here? Kind of.

Why it matters

Researchers at the big AI labs including Anthropic and Google DeepMind have quit in noisy ways, saying the models pose real threats and safety isn’t being taken seriously across the industry.

Other researchers have said the chance of AI killing us all is greater than 10 percent, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues.

That is a lot of ideas, and I am especially curious about the antitrust piece, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture, attempting to form a cartel, and even somehow finding a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs. So to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Kanter.

Jonathan brought huge antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster during his time as antitrust chief, and along with Lina Khan, led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. As you’ll hear him say, he won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still live in the Trump DOJ, surprising many.

That reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI debate — avowed libertarian and former Trump AI czar David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lina Khan saying there’s no need for an antitrust exemption.

This is all a lot, and you’ll hear Jonathan and me really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, and how it might interact with antitrust law, competition policy, and our relationship with China. Okay: Jonathan Kanter, former DOJ antitrust chief, on AI safety and regulation. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan Kanter, you’re the former head of the DOJ Antitrust Division in the Biden administration and a current professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. Welcome back to Decoder. This is great. You’re a private citizen now. You don’t have to give me the politician answers. I can say whatever I want. I feel so free.

I have a million questions about the state of AI regulation in America right now. There is a swirl of ideas about how we should or should not regulate these companies. There’s the Trump administration whose posture seems to be “no,” which is fascinating. You rarely see the federal government just decline to participate in the way that the Trump administration appears to be declining to participate.

What to watch

Let me give you my interpretation from the most generous to the most cynical, neither of which, TL;DR, should result in any sort of antitrust exemption. The most generous interpretation is that they’re afraid of the pace of innovation and the lack of regulation means they don’t see any lines on the road.

They don’t know where to drive and they’re worried about driving off the road or hitting somebody else. They’re begging for the government to step in and do something. Probably there’s a modicum of truth to that. I believe they believe it could destroy humanity. I’m not sure that that doomsday scenario is accurate, but I believe they believe that. That’s the more generous version.